Roads
by readerofasaph
Summary: Yukimura ponders his reasons for leaving tennis. Oneshot.


At some point, Yukimura Seiichi lost his tennis.

It happened so gradually he was barely aware of it: or rather, he was perfectly aware of it, but at the time it hadn't seemed to matter, and anyway there were so many other things besides tennis, weren't there? It'd begun with the little things, like not wanting to join Renji when he suggested they play a set or two just for fun; and then leaving practice just on time instead of staying after-hours. Then refusing to play out-of-school tournaments, and dropping out of the local club, until finally, frighteningly, he was ready to graduate from high school and leave the school club as well.

And he knew, when he went to Kyoto University, that he wouldn't join the club there; tennis didn't seem important enough to warrant even the two or three hours a week that social games demanded.

Most people who knew him blamed it on Guillain-Barre. They'd watch him fight his way back into the tennis scene – the hours spent lifting weights, kilometers and kilometers run around the Rikkai vicinity; standing on the courts, repeating the twist serve hundreds of times; practice matches with all his old friends, who found it strange and terrible playing against someone whose body remembered all the right moves but whose muscles couldn't quite manage to keep up, but stayed patient, were generous to him right through the long painful months of rehabilitation.

Most people had watched how he defeated Yamabuki's Sengoku in a brutal 6-2 set and then collapsed on the ground afterwards, barely able to stand; and decided that in the end the disease had taken too much, stolen what couldn't be replaced; Seiichi would never be able to fulfill the promise of his childhood years.

His family and Genichirou knew it wasn't that. Because Seiichi stood on the courts, one day, his second year of high school, and realized that he was already light-years ahead of the thirteen-year-old who'd collapsed on the courts; he was faster, stronger; his intuition keener, his skill set broader; a better tennis player in every sense.

He also knew, as a sixteen-year-old; that he'd begun to walk away from tennis, and he would never walk back.

Maybe it was because tennis, for him, had always been about Genichirou and Renji; and once they started to disintegrate, so did the game – and it had never really been about the game to begin with. The Promise, Seiichi thought, had been about honor and friendship and teenage bravado; tennis had simply been the obvious outlet.

If it hadn't been tennis, it would have been something else.

But as it so happened, tennis had been the glue that kept them together, and Seiichi wondered, what did it say about himself, that he was finally throwing tennis away? Because Genichirou was still playing, a powerful and uncompromising tennis that earned him prizes galore and a reputation that had spread beyond Japan; and he would still play, even when he went to university and maintained excellent grades; and then finally he would retire gracefully from the game, having set several national records, and devote himself to the corporate ladder, rising easily and naturally while continuing to improve at shougi.

Renji, on the other hand, like Seiichi, would leave tennis once he went to Todai, and study literature and history and eventually gain professorship and get published in every major academic journal. He'd meet a woman with the brains to match his (probably a science major) and they would get married and achieve tenure and live happily ever after. And their children would, of course, play tennis.

And Seiichi – would let them go. Not because he cared about them any less, because he didn't. Not because he was helpless in the face of change, because he wasn't. The power to affect people, to change their minds; that was the one skill Yukimura Seiichi knew to be innately his. But it was the kind of power that disappeared when you misused it.

He felt lonely, abandoned; he wanted to keep them by his side.

So he let them go. And he stopped playing tennis.

Renji and Genichirou understood, even if they were a trifle hurt. There were others who couldn't understand.

Akaya, for one.

Seiichi sat on the bench and looked at the horizon, at the pink-orange-mauve evening sky. Akaya was kneeling on the courts, gathering up tennis balls.

"Why?"

It was an obvious question; but not for Akaya, who never asked why. He was too alive, lived too much in the moment, to ever ask why.

"Tennis," Seiichi said, deciding to tell the truth, "means something different to you than it does to me."

Akaya blinked. He was sixteen now; taller, broader, and calmer, and Seiichi thought: If the Promise never did anything else, if it never helped anyone else, _you_ are a little stronger and a little wiser and capable of surviving on your own now, and it was worth it.

"But you love tennis," he said. "Don't you?" he asked, as if some terrible thought had occurred to him.

I do, Seiichi wanted to say, but there is also gardening. And painting. And some new person, or persons whom I will meet at Kyodai. And he or maybe she will show me something new to live for; and I will devote many years to it, and maybe my whole life as well, unless the road changes again.

Because the road changed all the time, and life was too short for just tennis.

Akaya would say, Life is too short to ever do anything but play tennis.

For a fleeting moment, Seiichi wondered: what it would be like to be him? To only know the sound of balls hitting clay and the satisfaction of aching muscles?

How could Akaya's soul be contented with so little?

He tolerated the feeling of melancholy for a while, but shrugged it off in the morning. He was, he knew, traveling on the right road.


End file.
